


For Reasons Unknown

by flyingisland



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Pining Shiro (Voltron), Roller Rink AU, Semi-Public Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-08 07:27:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17976962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/pseuds/flyingisland
Summary: Working as the light technician at an '80s-themed roller rink might not be the most glamorous job in the world, but it definitely comes with a few particularly good perks.





	For Reasons Unknown

**Author's Note:**

  * For [epiproctan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/epiproctan/gifts).



****ABBA booming through the speakers overhead does nothing to quell the heat currently boiling inside of him. Or maybe it only exacerbates his condition, he isn’t sure, and he definitely doesn’t want to confront those sorts of feelings right now, in the thick of a moment so captivating that he can barely grasp coherent thought at all.

Anymore, it’s hard to hear an electronic bassline without developing a solid half-chub, and it’s nearly impossible to witness bright makeup or leg warmers without feeling undoubtedly, uncomfortably hot under the collar. While this should be troublesome, to say the least, and while Shiro should probably call his therapist immediately and schedule an emergency appointment, he realizes with profound helplessness that he’s never going to get better if he keeps coming back here, to the source of all of his recent woes and only continues to enable the fast deterioration of his psyche.

Through the narrow tinted glass window just over the control panel, his eyes catch the slightest hints of flashing, multicolored lights. The gymnasium-style rink far below is bathed in a sheet of violet-tinted fog. There are black blobs of bodies moving about down there, too, dancing and laughing and wholly unaware of what the tech guy is doing with one of the waiters just beyond the reach of their vision. Their manager is out for the day, as he often is during the slow drag of the week and most hours during the weekends as well. It’s not like there’s anything for him to do anyway. It’s not like there’s anything for _any_ of them to do, really, except run out the clocks and pass their time unproductively, and occasionally sneak away for some sultry rendezvous in locked control rooms that are possibly the worst-kept secret around this place aside from their frequent suspicions that this whole business is probably some kind of elaborate and embarrassing money laundering front.

It might be surprising news to anyone who hasn’t stepped into the real world in the last thirty years, but an '80s-themed roller rink isn’t exactly the busiest place even during the weekends, as a niche experience that only draws in a particular brand of consumer. They have their regulars who know them by name. They have their drunken bachelorette parties that can barely stay stable on their skates. They have older couples and young children with their parents, but most people don’t come more than once or twice. They receive traffic very infrequently, as most people could probably find literally anything more enjoyable than choking on the hairspray fumes emanating from the waitstaff and nursing vertigo headaches after wiping out in the rink.

This sort of thing isn’t exactly in vogue anymore, and while Shiro can feel the looming job insecurity breathing down his neck every day that they end in the red, he can’t say that he particularly minds the privacy or the serenity or the general carefree demeanor that only a business failing this terribly can offer him.

And when Keith leans back, wiping a hand over the saliva that’s dribbled down his throat and accidentally hitting the lever to dim the lights with his elbow, Shiro decides that he doesn’t mind the fact that no one cares if he messes up either. If anything, it seems that the patrons enjoy the change, with the way that their small black bodies come closer together, anticipating a love song to fit the darkness.

Through the fog of pleasure, with trembling hands, he ignores the way that Keith tuts when he dips forward and successfully cuts off his range of motion. With an arm shoved between Keith’s face and his own crotch, he flips through the queue on the computer screen in search of a more befitting song to suit the sudden vibe that Keith’s clumsiness has settled over the waning crowd below. Another '80s tune ebbs in slowly. The ant-forms on the rink jitter and jerk about, gliding, clumsy and unpracticed, as they hold tight to the people that they’ve decided to dance with. He has a lot of trouble keeping an eye on them like this, but maybe that’s okay. He isn’t entirely sure who might be covering Keith’s extended break right now, but he’s confident that they can handle the dozen or so patrons currently moving about the rink.

When he leans back again, Keith’s shadowed eyes are watching him closely, carefully. They don’t exchange a lot of words during times like these, during the fleeting moments that they can steal away from work to be alone, but Shiro likes to think that there’s something more about their trysts, if only because his own embarrassing romantic streak won’t let him admit that maybe, sometimes, a fling is just a fling. That maybe, he’s capable of casual sex, too, and that nothing has to ever develop here just because another person is willing to touch him sensually.

That maybe, hopefully, he hasn’t put his entire life on hold just because he’s an idiot who fell for the guy who won’t even spare him a few words that aren’t, “don’t leave any marks” or “do you have a condom”.

He didn’t attend college for six years and wrack up a daunting $30k in student loans just to end up working minimum wage getting his dick sucked four to five times a week by the hottest waiter he’s ever seen. He definitely hasn’t neglected to look for a better paying gig just because he might still be holding out hope that any day now, Keith might look up at him and say something profound and romantic and beautiful that will prove to him indefinitely that they’re truly meant to be.

He threads his fingers through Keith’s hair, dropping his hand to cup his cheek in an action that’s clearly entirely too tender for how Keith himself must perceive their relationship. Keith leans back on the pads of his feet, drawing his brows close together as color settles under his purple-hued cheeks. The shoulder pads in his uniform crinkle when he swoops down. The sequins bedazzled along the back hit the light from outside and spring sparkles all along the walls. His mouth covers Shiro’s cock again, swallowing him deeply enough that Shiro can’t focus for too long on the pinching in his chest. He drops his head back against his chair, his eyes sliding closed slowly, dots of light popping up in the black of the back of his eyelids as Keith’s tongue drags from the base of him before swirling around the tip.

Up and down, warm and tight. He cums with a shudder and a cry caged behind his tightly-closed lips. He sits in dazed contentment for a short moment as he enjoys the warm rush of his orgasm tingling through him. The warmth and firmness of Keith propped between his knees rises and moves away, and Keith is gone just moments later, just as he always leaves too soon, after wiping his face and repositioning his hair, and sending Shiro the slyest of grins before slipping through the door.

Shiro is left in a small, claustrophobic room with the shuddering lights and the purple-hue, and a soft dick, oversensitive and still untucked from his pants, sitting sad and lonely and used against his thigh.

And thoughts of Keith—what he gets from this. What he wants from this. Why he never stays for longer than it takes for Shiro to cum, and if he’d ever considering being more than they are right now.

Shiro flips another switch to brighten the lights. He sets the next song to _It’s A Heartache_. He rubs a hand over his face and lets out a soft, miserable groan. The small crowd below thins out, the floor is devoid of no more than five people skating around down there now. He finally tucks himself back into his pants, clearing his throat and shifting in his seat. There are three hours left of his shift, of changing the lights to fit the songs and watching the reactions of their few patrons down below.

He went to school for cinema production. He got his master’s degree in fine arts. Once upon a time, he had big dreams of working on Blockbuster movies. He thought that he could win an Oscar someday, in the distant, now unreachable future. He interned at a news station out of college, he applied for many places and received few calls back, fewer interviews, little job offers.

And eventually, he settled for this, here. This job so thinly related to anything that he studied for. This career so ludicrously minuscule compared to his big dreams that he’s still neglected to add it to his Facebook account “employment” category in fear of humiliating himself among friends who, from their various updates, seem to have fully realized and achieved all of their own big dreams. It just says nothing, for now. For all that anyone knows, maybe, he’s so busy living the good life that he doesn’t have time for social media anymore.

Which, he thinks, is better than the alternative, than anyone actually coming to this place and witnessing him leaving the bathroom or clocking out for the night and realizing, once and for all, that he’s stalled and stuck and the only thing keeping him from fighting harder to make it big is one very pretty man with high cheekbones and glossy hair and eyes so deep and tremendously gorgeous that it feels like gazing at lavender-tinted diamonds each time that he catches himself looking at them. And the kicker, of course, is that he’s barely even a blip on this man’s radar. He’s barely even a thought in his mind.

But in the brief and fleeting moments when Keith does look at him and touches him and fucks him with such finesse and intimidating ease that he puts every other bedmate that Shiro’s had to shame, it feels nice to be seen by him. It feels nice to exist in his orbit for that short time.

It’s pathetic, he knows. It’s stupid and silly and an absolutely inane reason to keep himself from quitting here and looking for a job that pays more than eight dollars an hour.

But he’s always been a fool about love. And if he’s honest with himself, really, truly frank about his situation and his enjoyment of this tedious work and the weird customers and the thanklessness involved in pushing buttons while sitting on his ass at eight-hour intervals, he thinks that he might have just become complacent. He thinks that, perhaps, it’s just nice to slow down for a while after working so hard his entire youth just to end up at a dead-end place like this.

His parents don’t understand why he’s still toiling away here, but he hasn’t had the nerve to tell them the truth. He claims, instead, that he’s just waiting until he finds a good offer. He’s gaining some experience vaguely related to his desired field and biding his time until it becomes enough to look good on a resume. He’s been “trying”, if trying means sometimes looking at listings online and not filling out an application. He has a good reason, he swears it. He argues it with a loving and worried mother and a well-meaning but sometimes too nosy father all the time.

 _“You don’t have to worry about me,”_ he tells them often, _“I have a good reason, it’s okay.”_

And currently, that very reason is skating back out onto the rink to clean up a mess that Shiro can’t make out from his distant position in the control room above. Keith is poised though, and shockingly graceful on skates, sparkling in a tacky bedazzled vest and neon pink legwarmers with hair teased so ridiculously that it looks more like a tangled rat’s nest than anything that should exist organically on a human head.

Shiro almost laughs, settles instead on grinning wryly and propping his face in his hand. He can’t imagine a love story more ridiculous than this one. He can’t imagine that anyone in the whole world is dumber than he is, for getting himself wrapped up in this whole messed up situation in the first place.

 

* * *

 

 

Lance sends him a knowing look as he slips his roller skates on once again, raising a brow but pointedly not smiling, as though he really has any room to talk about slacking off at work given the sheer amount of time that he frequents the snack booth just to talk to the female cashiers that work over there. Keith levels him with an equally displeased expression, ignoring the nagging fear inside of him that he might have forgotten to right some part of his uniform or clean himself off completely in a way that would allude (embarrassingly and totally inappropriately) to just what he was getting up to in the control booth with the roller rink’s most eligible bachelor.

Lance clicks his tongue, the first one to break their shared gaze and return to whatever task he’s been pretending to perform for the last fifteen minutes or so. He spends a lot of time claiming that the skates need to be organized by anything but sizes, and even though Pidge is scheduled to take the evening shift and she’ll rearrange them yet again and leave another scathing note for the morning staff, Lance is dutifully making her job harder just to get away with slacking off, as per usual.

Keith finishes with the laces on his skates, testing the tightness by rotating his ankle and padding them against the floor. They’re good enough, so he shoves up, rising from the bench where he’d dropped down just moments earlier and fretting with the pieces of his gaudy uniform that won’t smooth back into place no matter how many times he fiddles with them.

He catches his reflection in the mirror on the adjacent wall, scrunching his nose as he realizes that he didn’t do quite as good of a job at fixing his hair as he might have thought back in the control room. The glitter on his cheeks is smudged too, but he isn’t willing to do anything about that. He’d already fussed plenty when Coran, their boss, had initially introduced it to the dress code. It was pretty effective at guaranteeing that he’d never be able to stop anywhere between work and home without receiving a lot of strange looks, even out of uniform. And while Keith has to admit that he’s never had a very colorful social life outside of this place, he’d prefer to visit the gas station or a fast food joint before he returned to his apartment and settled in for the night without dealing with the inevitable raised eyebrows and half-hidden laughter that usually awaits him each time that he risks it.

He’s almost positive that there must exist some photo evidence of him, glittery with over-teased hair, online somewhere, poking fun at how stupid he looks and how he’s presumably the kind of person who dresses that way with the intention of being seen in public. He knows that regular people who haven’t experienced this fresh Hell firsthand have no way of knowing that his general fashion sense does not, in fact, involve body glitter and hairspray, and that the more times he actually goes outside like that, the more likely it becomes that some people will just begin to associate him with those unfortunate style choices.

He swears that last week, when he stopped by the grocery store for milk that he’d run out of that morning before he left, he’d caught a few teenagers taking videos of him on their phones. It had taken a substantial amount of will not to snap at them and to duck his head and keep quiet, and his dinner cereal hadn’t even tasted that good when he’d gone home and poured himself a bowl. He’d thought about it every time that he poured that gallon until it was used up. He’d been so burned by the entire experience that, on his next day off, he’d driven to a store further away to do his shopping. Sometimes he wonders if life would be easier if he looked for a different job, but…

He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to think about that right now. Not when someone apparently vomited at the corner of the rink and Lance so considerately waited until he got back to tell him, instead of just taking care of it himself.

With a deep breath, he digs through the supply closet in search of the proper PPE. He tosses out the bucket and a sponge-mop and the required powder chemicals, and pulls out a couple of rubber gloves from the box. He sends Lance’s back a final glare for good measure, stopping over by the mop tub to fill his bucket before meandering out to the rink. Hunk is already out there, guarding the mess until he arrives. He looks relieved to see that someone has finally come to his rescue, and while Keith feels the urge to apologize for taking so long, the words that leave his mouth instead are, “Lance really had to leave you out here, huh?”

Hunk smiles wryly, wringing his hands together as he sidesteps the mess and watches Keith as though he’s resisting the urge to offer to help, even though Keith isn’t wanting to spend more time messing with it than he absolutely has to, and he’d probably be done by the time that Hunk managed to grab himself gloves from the supply closet anyway.

“It’s fine, I mean… it’s nasty. I almost got sick too, but… guess it beats cleaning the bathrooms, right? Lance said that he’d do it if I waited out here for you.”

“And you believed him?” Keith scoffs a laugh. “Rookie mistake.”

Hunk laughs too, louder than he probably should, his cheeks pink as he scratches at the back of his head and darts his eyes between the two skaters currently making wide circles around the rink. He continues watching them as Keith gets to work, clearly uncomfortable standing out here by the mess longer than he needs to, but unwilling to leave him alone for whatever reason. Hunk is too nice for his own good and Lance, of course, has been known to take advantage of that. But Keith takes advantage of Lance’s stupidity and his willingness to be bribed, so he isn’t sure if he has the moral high ground to make any sweeping judgments on Hunk’s behalf.

But he tries to be quick just so Hunk doesn’t have to stand here, guarding the mess as he cleans, any longer than necessary. He finds that he can’t focus, however, can’t shake this feeling of eyes on him that he knows the source of without even looking up.

Even if he could see through the control room window high above, he wouldn’t be willing to give Shiro the satisfaction of knowing that he can feel him now. He wouldn’t want to stroke his ego or give him any weird ideas. But he does smile, terse and hidden poorly as he turns his back sharply in that direction, when the lights rise higher and change to a rosy tone, and the song fades abruptly from _Karma Chameleon_ to _Total Eclipse of the Heart_. He sends Hunk back inside moments later with the bag, awkwardly mopping up the final remnants of the mess before dropping a few neon “wet floor” signs around the drying spot on the floor. Finally, once everything is done and he’s content enough with his sloppy work to leave it be, he turns his eyes upwards, at the blackened windows of the control room and Shiro’s eyes watching him, that he can feel more than he can see, all the way up there, secluded in his own mini-prison where he spends the vast majority of his boring, aimless shifts.

He knows that Shiro can’t make out his expression from up there. He knows that he can’t see the color that’s newly risen to his cheeks.

But when Bonnie Tyler belts out, _“I need you more tonight, I need you more than ever”,_ he feels it like he’s never felt anything before in his life. And he hates that he feels it, hates that this couldn’t have been a casual, forgettable affair that he compartmentalizes and leaves behind at work and refuses to revisit until he clocks in the next day. He hates that Shiro had to touch his face this time, that Shiro always wants to make this more than it needs to be, wants more from him than he’s comfortable giving right now, and… regretfully…

That there’s a part of him that wants more than nothing than to give in and let things happen the way that they’re so clearly meant to happen.

 

* * *

 

 

Shiro skirts around the various tables in the break room on a loopy path to the vending machines, rubbing a growing migraine between his eyebrows with the heel of his palm and mentally calculating the seconds into minutes into hours until he can finally go home.

At one of the tables near the center sits Lance, picking the crusts off of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich idly while he scrolls through some webpage on his phone. He doesn’t register Shiro’s presence at first, doesn’t raise a hand in welcome or greet him with the same tired hello that Shiro has come to expect from him. Shiro chalks it up as exhaustion, as maybe having a bad day at work. Many of the qualities of this job that can positively drive a person mad, so he can definitely empathize, but that doesn’t stop him from sliding into the seat across from Lance once he purchases a water bottle and a bag of pretzels, or from trying to start a hopefully innocuous conversation about work that will in no way allude to his sneaky but admittedly silly ulterior motives.

“So,” he starts off awkwardly, already, as he tugs at the edges of his pretzel bag with both hands to pry it open, “You and Hunk went to school together, right?”

Lance flicks his gaze upward. The glossy body glitter artfully spread over his cheeks sends flecks of light sparkling in the deep blue of his eyes. His lashes look thicker here, with the makeup and the harsh lighting of the room. His hair, shorter than Keith’s, isn’t quaffed in quite the same unflattering way as most other people on staff. He still looks silly, but maybe less so than most people would. He stills looks like he just stepped out of a time capsule, sure, but he’s managed to make the look work for him better than Shiro admits mentally than he probably could, if he were required to be in uniform too.

Shiro, for a moment, wonders what Keith might look like if he actually put the same level of effort into his appearance as Lance so clearly does. If he didn’t just rub the required makeup over his face in messy splotches of roll-on gel glitter at the apples of his cheeks and a smokey eye that by the end of his shift always ends up looking a lot more like dark raccoon circles. Lance is Coran’s favorite of the waitstaff for a reason, Shiro thinks. Keith calls him a brown-noser, but deep down, Shiro can’t help but respect Lance for caring even though he’s only working here part-time, two to three days a week, for some extra change while he’s still in school. He isn’t stuck in a tanked job market like Shiro, and he isn’t just here because he doesn’t have anything else to do like Keith, maybe. Shiro isn’t actually sure why Keith still works here. They’ve never had a conversation about it, just as they’ve never talked about any of the other nagging questions that he’d so love to learn the answers to.

Lance clears his throat, propping himself higher on his elbows and squaring Shiro with a sleepy smile.

“Yeah,” he says, “Keith went to school with us too, but he graduated early. That’s what you really wanted to know, right?”

Shiro’s cheeks feel immediately ten degrees warmer, and he masks his embarrassment and surprise behind a cough in his closed fist. His prosthetic is still gripping the pretzels and the bag tumbles wildly, spilling out over the table as he jerks back to sit straighter. He elects to ignore it, even as Lance’s gaze slides downward to look at his mess for a fraction of a second before creeping back to his reddened face.

“Come on, Shiro, you can’t possibly think that everyone around here has no idea what you guys get up to all the time, right? I mean, Keith takes like, what, ten breaks a day to come see you? Why don’t you just ask him all of this stuff instead of trying to be sneaky? You’re obviously not very good at it.”

Shiro breaks his eyes away, instead electing to let them linger on the blue glow behind the lighted vending machines, the black streaks of roller skate tracks on the white speckled linoleum, the dusty, cobweb littered corners of the off-white walls. He drums his fingers against the table, finally unflexing his muscles to drop the empty bag down on top of his new pile of table pretzels. And he sits still and quiet for a long moment, wondering if Lance and Keith were friends. Wondering what Keith might have been like when he was younger and less jaded and disillusioned enough that he could have, once upon a time, actually had bright hopes and big dreams beyond wearing makeup and blowing his co-worker in the control room every time that a Bonnie Tyler song plays over the radio for some reason. If Keith was ever as chipper and romantic as Lance, or Shiro himself still manage to be.

And he wonders what might have happened to change that. Why it seems, now, that he wants nothing less than to get close to other people, no matter how often he makes the mistake of accidentally stringing Shiro along.

With a shallow breath, and a gentle shake of his head to clear his thoughts, Shiro looks at Lance again, who has allowed his phone screen to darken and stopped fretting over the crust of his sandwich, and is now watching Shiro lazily like a big cat considering if it’s really worth it to stop basking in the sun just to pounce on a bird that’s wandered close enough to swipe at.

“Keith and I, uh… we don’t really… _talk_. About things like that, or… anything.”

Lance’s brows draw lower and his cheeks hollow. He sucks in a long, deep breath and turns his chin upward, burying his teeth into the side of his cheek. He falls back slightly, tipping his head to the side and balling his fists on the table.

“What do you guys possibly do when he goes in there—WAIT no, ew, are you serious?! Shiro, you can’t be serious, am I really covering his shifts all the time so he can—so you and him can—”

“Lance, I-I, I’m sorry, I—” Shiro breaks off that sentence, his hands flailing in front of him in a vain attempt to quiet Lance down lest anyone else wander in here and overhear, “It’s not like that, I—I mean, it _is_ , but I want it to be more, okay? I just… I don’t really know how to broach the subject. Keith… clearly doesn’t want more than what we have, and he’s not exactly the most forthcoming guy in the world—”

Lance snorts, collecting himself at Olympic gold medal-worthy speed, “You got that right. Sounds like that snobby bastard.”

And he slots his fingers together, leaning forward in his seat and bending himself inward in body language reminiscent of every mafia movie that Shiro has ever seen.

“He’s been weird like that forever, man, since middle school, at least. That’s when he moved here, and girls were always trying to ask him out. He didn’t go to any dances or anything, didn’t make an effort to make friends. He’s just an odd guy, doesn’t give a damn about other people at all. If he’s messing around with you, that’s honestly more than I’d expect from him. Maybe… it doesn’t feel like a lot to you because you seem pretty… decent at being social, but for Keith, I think that’s probably a big step. He’s like—”

Lance pulls back again, and Shiro feels dizzied by how much he’s moving around. Lance cups a hand under his chin, his feet tap against the floor under the table.

“Most people are like, you know, at different levels of being good with people. Like me? I’m obviously a solid nine-point-eight. Hunk’s like… a seven. I’d say you’re an eight-point-five—pretty good average. You’re good with people. But Keith? He’s been a one his whole life—totally incapable of having a normal conversation with anyone and definitely not willing to learn how. So man, I don’t really know what to tell you. He’s just a weird guy, and if you want something from him, he’s not gonna understand unless you hold him down and explain literally every specific detail of your intentions.”

Shiro doesn’t say as much, but he knows that he has the “holding Keith down” part mastered just fine. It’s just the “actually talking to him like a normal human being” aspect that he has trouble with.

He heaves a sigh, plucking a single pretzel from the top of the pile on the table and breaking off an edge between his teeth.

“So say that I do tell him,” Shiro draws out slowly, distantly, as he stares at the shuddering glow of the vending machine casting long scores of shadows over the walls, “Say that I spill everything and he still turns me down… what then?”

Lance is silent for a long moment. Shiro can hear him fumbling with his drink and crinkling his lunch bag, and from the corner of his peripherals, he can make out the blurry outline of him rising from his seat to leave. He stops by the trash can first to throw away the paper bag that he brought his food in. And he pauses at the table across from Shiro, and only then do Shiro’s eyes rise from his long legs in those ridiculous baby blue tights to the glittery shorts that he wears over them, up and along a cheetah-print undershirt, the padded shoulders of his bedazzled vest that matches Keith’s—

And right into Lance’s sharp, focused eyes, rounded with a perfectly-crafted eyeliner and eyeshadow that brings a life and a depth to his face in ways that Keith’s always just manages to make him look tired and washed out.

“That’s the risk that you always take when you love someone, big guy,” Lance says simply, drumming his knuckles over the table as though banishing any bad luck that Shiro might have earned them by talking about the worst outcome, “Beats the alternative though, right?”

He’s gone soon after, leaving Shiro behind to fester in his thoughts. He wonders if the torture of never knowing for sure could really be worse than being rejected. He wonders if he could actually continue whatever this is between him and Keith, casually, if he knew for certain that there was never any chance of it becoming any more than it is.

It’s not fair to Keith that he developed feelings when, from the beginning, they’ve both agreed that this was nothing but a casual thing. That first day together, when Keith had been sent up to Shiro’s secluded prison to request a song change and somehow one thing had led to another. Since the beginning, Keith has reassured him time and time again that he isn’t looking for anything with strings, or shackles. It’s just for fun. It’s just to pass the time at a boring job.

So if he tries to change the rules, if he attempts to deepen their relationship and Keith rejects him… Is Keith really the bad guy here, or is Shiro just an idiot, once again, for ever deluding himself into believing that life or love or Keith himself could ever be anything but what they’ve reassured him again and again that they are without any fine print or secrets or motivations to deceive him?

Is it worth the risk of ruining things as they are now? Is it worth losing Keith and their mid-shift rendezvous, and the buzzing energy that he can feel thick and nearly-tangible between them? Is it worth breaking his own heart, embarrassing himself, outing himself as a sappy idiot to the one person who he’s ever met who truly seems to look beyond his gawky dorkiness and see him as something even remotely similar to sexually appealing?

Lance seems to think that it is. Lance seems to understand love and relationships at least to a degree far more in-depth than Shiro could ever hope to.

It’s a lot to think about, especially over a fleeting lunch break and table pretzels and water that tastes more like plastic than he’d prefer right now.

These thoughts follow him for the rest of his shift. And later on, just hours before he leaves for the evening, a frazzled Keith barges into his office to relay a complaint from one of their few patrons that he’s been marathoning too much Bonnie Tyler.

 

* * *

 

Keith’s thighs encase the outside of his own, his hands tight and knuckles shaking white as they brace the opposite armrests of the control seat. The wheels scrape against the hardwood of the floor, and despite the fact that Shiro attempts to keep them stable with feet firmly planted and a hand pressed into the side of the control panel, they jostle with each lift of Keith’s hips and each time that he drops down.

 _Take My Breath Away_ vibrates in the smoky air around them. The blue-tinted spotlights stab through from the ceiling beyond the glass. The rink itself is empty, Shiro allowed the system to fall into autopilot just after Keith slipped into the room.

He’s buried deep inside of Keith now, breathing labored in and out and struggling and failing endlessly to keep himself from falling only deeper into irrevocable love as he gazes through the hazy blue dark at Keith’s flushed face, the glitter sparkling on his skin, his feathered hair sweaty and standing up in odd directions, fallen in his beautiful, violet-flecked eyes. He’s tight around Shiro in a way that makes his entire body hum with warmth. He’s breathless and gorgeous and so within reach but still so distant that Shiro can’t help but feel as though he might cry. Instead, he steadies his prosthetic against Keith’s waist. He hopes that touching him like this won’t bother him, but he can’t stop it, can’t keep himself from the sight of Keith under his hand. The idea that maybe someday he can touch him and actually feel him, and Keith won’t shirk away and he won’t flee from this confined control room before Shiro even manages to get fully re-dressed.

But for now, he has Keith. Keith rides him slowly, just out of beat with the song. Shiro suspects that maybe that’s on purpose. He thinks that no one hates the playlist here more than Keith does, and fucking out of beat must surely be the most successfully that he’s ever managed to put his nose up at it. Shiro finds that it doesn’t bother him. He finds that his thoughts rise up and disappear just as quickly, like bubbles in boiling water—here, and gone and drowned in pleasure moments later. There’s nothing now that really matters but Keith, so warm and soft and so tight as he pulls himself up, as he rocks, as the wheels of the chair scrape against the floor, and the song fades out slowly. Shiro breathes in the sound of Keith’s muffled noises. He lives in this moment as though it might never end, as though this could truly be a forever if he believes in it hard enough.

Keith falls forward, Shiro knows that he’s growing tired. He grinds instead, and the feeling is so impossibly amazing that Shiro’s thoughts blank completely for moments that feel like an eternity of endless bliss. Keith presses their foreheads together. His lips linger so close to Shiro’s that if either of them were brave enough or willing enough to break the spell hanging over them, they could bridge the gap and kiss.

He snakes a hand between them instead, distracting himself as he bites off yet another in an endless line of almost-moans that he fears might ruin this experience for Keith. He doesn’t know what it is about him that makes Keith as flighty as he often is, and as hard as it is not to push the envelope, not to do and say and _be_ everything that’s always nagging his thoughts in moments like these, he trains himself to be on his best behavior. He grasps Keith’s cock in his palm, wraps his fingers loosely around the base and drags up, emulates the pace of Keith’s hips grinding forward and back—and Keith groans, low and quiet for the very first time uninhibited. His pretty face is damp with sweat and he smells so strongly of hairspray and dollar store gel glitter that Shiro’s throat itches with it.

The sight of him—of the glitter and the dark makeup and the wild mop of hair, the shoulder pad vest pulled open to reveal his firm chest and the subtle slope of his narrow waist into shapely hips—it’s all blurred and dreamlike. This moment, blue and hazy and vibrating with the bass of an Aerosmith song, Shiro drowns in it. He moves his hand faster, drinks in more of Keith’s noises, he’s so terribly, terribly in love with this man. He can’t stop himself from tipping up and pressing their lips together.

Keith cums, hot and wet against his closed fist. He jerks and chokes and tears his face away from Shiro’s to bury his burning cheeks in Shiro’s still-clothed collar bone.

And Shiro, at the feeling of Keith tightening around him, at the sight and sounds of his orgasm shaking through him like live electricity—he cums unexpectedly, not even close moments before, but dragged along with this tornado that is Keith Kogane, again and again and again.

He enjoys the feeling of Keith breathing around him, the strong smell of the products on his body, the scratchy feeling of the sequins on his work jacket chafing against his arms. Keith sighs loudly, Shiro feels like he’s walking on the clouds. He’s never had the opportunity to hold Keith after things have ended, not for this long. They rarely have the opportunity of a completely-empty rink to mess around without Keith needing to return sooner from his impromptu breaks. But just as he’s deciding that he really could get used to this, if Keith would be willing to do something like this again, Keith shoves up, stumbles from the edge of the chair, and fumbles around on the floor in search of each scattered piece of his uniform.

Shiro watches him for a fraction of a moment, and in that moment, at lightning speed, Keith’s already managed to finagle his pants around his waist and his belt through the loop, and Shiro knows that he needs to move quickly if he’s ever going to move at all. Before he knows it, Keith will be through the door again without a word, and he’ll lose this opportunity until the next time that they meet, and he inevitably fumbles that one as well.

So he reaches forward and rests a gentle hand on Keith’s wrist. It’s the prosthetic again, free of the mess that he’s currently holding away from his very-stainable shirt and off to the side just in case. Keith’s eyes dart to his face, then away. His hair is such a mess that Shiro isn’t sure if he’ll ever be able to fix it. The glitter is smudged so terribly that it’s traveled all the way from the apples of his cheeks to his chin and the bridge of his nose. Shiro’s sure that he probably has some on the collar of his shirt too, but he can’t say that he minds it too much, can’t claim that he isn’t just a little bit jazzed about the prospect of wearing a memento this experience on his uniform for the rest of his shift.

“H-hey,” he starts nervously, “I was thinking, you know, maybe if you’re not busy—”

“I’m busy, sorry,” Keith says curtly, tugging himself away and moving a few paces back, curiously determined to look just over Shiro’s shoulder at the door instead of straight into his eyes, “Look, I… Thanks for the sex, but we’re not doing this—not… making this a relationship or whatever. If you don’t just want something casual, I’m sorry, but I don’t… do that.”

Shiro’s jaw slackens. His eyes still feel wet. His throat continues to itch, and he pulls his arm away just a little bit too late. His cheeks burn, but he nods slowly. Breathing softly and struggling to find the right words to say in order to salvage even the smallest shreds of his newly wounded pride.

Keith bites his lip, and he angles himself so he can peer through the window out onto the rink. It’s still empty, and the automatic lights are drawing slow circles over the floor. They shine in the gloss of it, in the scuffs and dents that the buffer can’t ever seem to take out.

“I’m sorry,” Keith repeats, as though that could in any way make Shiro feel better, “You’re… a good guy. I’m just—”

“It’s okay,” Shiro interrupts, stopping only to clear his throat to rid it of the creakiness and the awkward stilts in his speech, “I’m… I’m fine with this, really! I just—I thought maybe, you… you know, if you ever wanted to do this outside of work too, I’d… be okay with that.”

He laughs, scratching nervously at the back of his neck. It’s still damp with sweat. When he pulls his hand away, there’s glitter on the tips of his fingers.

“If you wanted to mess around in a bed instead of at work for once. It would probably be a lot more comfortable than this chair.”

Keith’s brows bow and he sucks in the side of his cheek. He looks from the window to the door, to the floor between their feet and to Shiro, still untucked from his pants. Shiro tries not to feel too embarrassed, but when Keith finally looks back at his face, he hopes that he’s discreet enough when he slips himself back through the slit of them and zips up his fly. He’ll worry about the condom later. Keith doesn’t mention that he didn’t take it off yet, and it seems that neither of them wants to address it.

It’s just another addition to the long list of things that they don’t talk about, albeit, this time, something that Shiro is more than eager to ignore until Keith leaves and he can discard of it properly.

“You know.” Keith sighs deeply. He’s already managed to re-button his shirt and somewhat fix his hair. This is usually the time that he’d take his leave, but for whatever reason, he lingers. Shiro takes it as a good sign, despite just being rejected moments ago. “That’s… that would be fine, yeah, sure. Uh… My number is on the directory in the office, so… if you wanna call me when you’re available, that would be… fine.”

Shiro perks up, his heart hammers in his chest. He nods just a little too eagerly, too jerky and quick as he resists the urge to jump up from his seat and draw Keith into his arms. That would definitely be a bad move, he knows, and it might be enough for Keith to retract his offer to meet up. So despite how excited he is, despite how suddenly alive and awake and recharged he feels, he simply smiles, simply rests back in his chair and forces himself to calm down.

And he says, just before Keith takes his leave, “Alright, great. I’m looking forward to it.”

Keith doesn’t agree, doesn’t confirm that he’s also excited for their first meetup outside of work, but he does seem to take more time than usual before he slips through the door.

And when the song changes again, it’s Anita Baker’s _Sweet Love_ , which Shiro decides can’t be anything but a good sign.

 

* * *

 

“So, have you talked to Shiro lately?”

Keith pauses as he rolls the glitter applicator over his cheeks in quick circles, raising an eyebrow and turning his eyes to catch Lance’s behind him in the mirror that hangs on the wall just inches away from his face.

Lance is currently tying the laces of his skates, one knee pulled up close to his chest as the wheels scuff quietly against the glossy wood of the bench on which he sits. The makeup that he’d already applied just before Keith clocked in is glittering under the fluorescent lights above them, casting small pinpricks of sparkling color over the hollows of his eyes and the bridge of his nose, and the whites of his teeth as he grins knowingly in Keith’s direction.

Keith scoffs, shrugging noncommittally and ignoring the heat that rises under his skin. He turns his attention back to the glitter, rubbing a liberal amount onto his cheekbones before capping the applicator and tossing it aside, replacing it in his hand with a small eyeshadow palette that he regards with a healthy level of disdain before he begins smearing it haphazardly around his eyes.

Lance claims that makeup is gender neutral and that the '80s, of all decades, seemed to understand that. Lance claims that it’s akin to new age warpaint, that there isn’t anything unmanly or embarrassing about enhancing their appearances just because they’re male. But Keith isn’t bothered by it because he feels as though it threatens his fragile shreds of masculinity. He doesn’t care that people outside of this business give him strange looks and that he spends his time these days perpetually wearing the remnants of eyeliner that won’t stop clinging to his lashes no matter how much he tries to rub it off, and that to certain people, maybe that would be considered humiliating. Keith doesn’t have the patience to feel insecure about what other people think of his appearance. He doesn’t value other people’s opinions nearly enough to give a damn about what they think of him.

But it’s messy and it’s annoying, and at the end of the day, he’s left feeling greasier and more miserable after accidentally smudging this crap every time that he needs to scratch his face. And he’d like to have even just one peaceful morning before the rink opens just to be alone with his thoughts, without being forced to socialize captively with Lance who surely gets here early just so he can badger everyone else.

He allows Lance to wait for him to respond, not particularly interested in having this conversation when he’s barely even awake yet. He can smell coffee brewing in the break room, and while it calls to him, tempts him away from his current menial tasks as he sets down the eye shadows and reaches for the hairspray, he knows that he’ll enjoy his cup of it more if he doesn’t have to come back in here afterward to finish putting together his stupid uniform.

Finally, once he manages to feather his hair in the exact way that Lance has instructed for him to time and time again, he turns around, hairspray bottle still in hand as though he has any intention of weaponizing it. As though Lance has any reason to believe that he should tread carefully in this conversation lest he earn himself a face full of ozone-destroying spray.

“I have,” he says simply, “What of it?”

Lance’s smile curls into something more sly, catlike and all-knowing and desperately in need of a hard fist to crack it. He drops one leg to the floor, raising the other and beginning to fiddle with the laces of the skate hanging loosely around his foot.

“Just wondering, no need to get to defensive—”

He tuts as Keith opens his mouth to argue, waving a finger in the air.

“Hey, hey, I _know_ how weird you are about these things, Keith. Don’t forget, I had to suffer through seven years of school with you. I know how you are.”

Keith rolls his eyes. He tosses the hairspray bottle back into the duffle bag that houses his small collection of beauty supplies and crouches down to pull up the zipper.

“I just think Shiro’s a nice guy, that’s all,” Lance continues blithely, tightening the laces and tying them swiftly before sliding that leg down to the floor and rising unsteadily to his feet, “I know you’re weird about dating and stuff, but he’s nice, right? Whatever you’re afraid of, I don’t think Shiro is the type of person to do that to you. Unless you’re afraid of getting treated really good in a relationship or like, enjoying yourself too much.”

Keith doesn’t feel as though he has to explain himself to Lance, of all people, but he does find it difficult not to argue just for the sake of wiping that smug grin off of Lance’s stupid face. He loses that opportunity moments later, as Lance skates past him, pausing only to rest a “comforting” hand on his shoulder that he promptly shoves off. And he’s thankful that Lance is quick to leave once he tells him, fleetingly, “Just be good to him, Keith. That guy’s over the moon for you,” because the words alone scorch the shells of his ears, and burn long trails of color from his cherry-splotched cheeks to his color-blotched throat. It takes him entirely too long to collect himself after that. Long enough that he misses the opportunity to pour himself a cup of coffee before he needs to unlock the front doors and turn on the open sign.

He can hear the music humming from the rink as he passes. He can see the lights from inside bleeding through the doorway into the entryway. The concessions girls are popping popcorn as he skates by. The arcade buzzes and beeps and flashes with a dozen different 8-bit animations designed to emulate the classic ‘80s-style video games.

He’s stuck in a time warp here. He wasn’t even alive long enough ago that any of this feels charming or nostalgic or anything but dreadfully tacky. But he also knows that he’s stuck inside of himself, in a version still stalled in a mindset that’s been culminating in him since he was young, a defunct and pre-programmed sort of emotional bloatware that nags him constantly:

_Don’t trust anyone. Don’t let them in._

_They’ll leave, they’ll hurt you._

_Even if, at first, they pretend to be kind._

He has his suspicions that Lance might be right, as much as it aches in his chest and throbs in his thoughts to ever even consider admitting it. He has a feeling that Shiro, of all people, wouldn’t let him down.

But it’s difficult to move from a comfortable place to something uncharted and dangerous. It’s hard to consider growing further up than the soil where he’s been so firmly planted for so many years, when he isn’t sure if he can even survive in the open air.

Tears for Fears is lulling through the speakers after he finishes opening up. Romelle, one of the concessions girls, offers him a giant pretzel that got torn in the oven while they were baking it. She even throws in the cheese for free, even though it’s not burned or out of date, or damaged in a way that would render it unsellable. She tells him that he looks worried today. She hopes that some food will cheer him up.

He wishes that it were that easy, but he thanks her nonetheless.

The food tastes good. The rink is empty for a blessed few hours before the first customers slip in.

He wipes the windows around the rink as a slow day drags on. He hums along to music that’s become so normalized for him that often he can hear it in the backdrop of his dreams.

And when he risks a look through the glass up at the shadowed windows of the control room, when he peers through the scores of long violet-hued lights and the fog pouring from the vents, and the glittery, atmospheric glow of the high ceiling above the patrons skating slowly down below, he can’t see anything but black tinted windows.

But he knows that Shiro is in there, and that, maybe, Shiro’s looking at him too.

He doesn’t like how the thought of that alone makes his heart rattle in his chest.

He doesn’t like how breathless he feels when he imagines what Shiro sees in him all the way up there, looking down.

This is bad, he knows it. This is really, really bad.

But he can’t stop himself from looking up and wondering about Shiro.

He can’t stop himself from imagining what it might feel like to lower his walls and actually let someone in.

 

* * *

 

The first text feels to Shiro as though he’s cutting off his fingers at the first knuckle. The wait after feels like he’s sucked every ounce of air from his lungs. Five minutes feel like drowning perpetually on his living room couch, without even the possibility of death to free him. The next twenty, he’s resigned himself to quitting his job and living out the rest of his days as a hermit far away from the city lines, avoiding the humiliation that he’d surely experience if he returned to work and had to face Keith after being so brusquely rejected by him.

He’s already wondering how easy it might be to build himself a log cabin and live the remainder of his days foraging for berries in the closest forest that he can find, when finally, nearly forty-five minutes later, his phone buzzes in his lap, and he’s so overwhelmed with surprise that he jerks forward and nearly topples down to the floor. He sits up straight and his muscles bunch painfully. His breathing is short and labored, and he’s positive, at this moment, that if Keith could see him acting like such a loser, he’d absolutely regret whatever text he sent in response that wasn’t a more straightforward and firmly-stated rejection.

His first text to Keith was simple. Undeniably cool, painstakingly crafted to come off as casual and not committed to this as he could possibly come up with after typing and re-typing the message nearly a dozen times over and over again in pursuit of the right amount of emojis, the most captivating words, the proper level of punctuation and capitalization that would perhaps make him seem more aloof and cavalier and attractive in Keith’s eyes.

Just below his masterfully crafted, _“hey, Shiro here. got your number from the work directory. you busy today?”,_ followed by a simple smiley face, the new message settles itself in the blank gaps of their otherwise still empty conversation window. He stares at the plain bold letters of Keith’s name at the top of the screen, uniform and unemotional. He’d removed every emoji that he’d framed the name with prior. Started with a shameful smattering of hearts and love-related smileys before deleting them and reapplying others, and inevitably settling on just Keith’s name, on nothing damning or weird. On something simple enough that hopefully, he won’t seem like a serial killer or a weirdo, or the type of person that someone like Keith definitely wouldn’t want to spend more time with. He’d run through so many possibilities of Keith somehow seeing it in his imagination that he’d decided against being too mushy so soon in this non-relationship. He’d taken such a substantially obscene amount of time combing over just Keith’s name in his contacts that he’d been surprised, when he’d finally garnered the nerve to actually text Keith, that an hour and a half had passed.

And now, all of that hard work has come to fruition. But when he thinks about actually opening this text and reading what is so much more likely to be an excuse not to meet up than the heartfelt confession that his stupid, lovestruck brain is hoping for, frankly, his stomach feels like it’s tied up in knots and his palms feel clammy, his head light and his heart too heavy and beating far too hard in his chest.

He wastes a lot of time pointedly not reading what Keith said in response. He tries to distract himself from the inevitable rejection. He’s trying so hard to pretend that he’s still just waiting for that text back, even as his phone vibrates a second time to remind him of the unread message. He’s trying to tell himself that none of this has to happen and time doesn’t have to pass if he just buries his heels and plugs his ears and refuses to move forward.

Because anything is better than a definite no, he realizes that now. He can’t be hopeful if Keith tells him outright that he’s changed his mind, he’s busy with his boyfriend or some cute guy that he met outside of work. Shiro is fun when he’s bored, but he’s not a monogamous kind of guy. The possibilities are as endless as they are painful to think about. The realization that he’s making Keith wait just as he’d so despised waiting hits him belatedly, only after an entire five minutes of avoidant agony tick by.

Finally, he swallows thickly, taking a long breath. He resigns himself to whatever he might read in Keith’s message, and he forces himself to pull his eyes down to it.

 

_Do you want me to come over_

 

Shiro stares at it for a very long time. His hands tremble so terribly that his phone almost slips through them onto the carpet under his feet. But he grasps it tighter, fumbles with the keys and sends a premature text and nearly screams in misery, nearly throws it across the room in his sudden fervent horror, almost does many things as he stares in terror down at his responding, “sufhg” before he collects himself well enough to type out another message.

Thankfully, in the time that it takes for him to do so, Keith doesn't seem to have read the message. The tiny “seen” beneath the first one doesn’t appear until a few moments after he manages to cover his tracks.

 _“Sorry, I dropped my phone,”_ he adds, then, _“Sounds good to me though. I’ll send you my address.”_

And after, he makes a point of focusing on all of the letters and numbers that he types, makes sure to be specific but curt with his directions. He studies the text for a few moments longer in search of any inaccuracies. He’s only slightly aware of how much more seriously he’s taking this booty call than any sane person would, given the situation and the lack of reasons why he should be committing more to this than simply sending Keith his location via that capability in the texting app.

He’d cleaned his house this morning in preparation. He’d stopped by the grocery store and bought snacks and alcohol, just in case. He’d went through his Netflix history and added a sizable list of his favorite romantic comedies to his favorites for easier access. He’d burned candles and blown them out too, earlier, in hopes that the residual smell of them would make his apartment feel more comfortable. Hoping that the absence of actually _lit_ candles would make all of this seem a lot less corny and romantic to Keith than absolutely necessary. He’d vacuumed, styled his hair. He’d picked out his favorite shirt and the jeans that hug his backside in a way that always manages to garner him just the right kind of attention. And he’d pulled his softest and most comfortable blanket out of the top of his closet and slung it over the back of his couch.

Everything is perfect now. His dishes are clean, there’s easily accessible food in the fridge. He’d cleaned the dust out of two wine glasses just in case. He’d bought a new pack of condoms and a fresh bottle of lube, then grimaced at his own embarrassing level of dedication before pouring just enough of it down the drain that it might look to Keith as though he’s actually been sexually active anywhere but at work within the last six months.

Keith texts him back moments later.

 

_On my way. See you soon._

 

Which comes a lot faster than the others. He wonders exactly what might have been distracting Keith before. He tries not to allow his imagination to conjure up an image of Keith, just as he had, agonizing over what to send. Of Keith sitting in his own living room staring at a sent text and wondering which string of words might make him sound like the best, most eloquent version of himself. Which message might convey his intentions for today in just the perfect way—or if maybe he’d simply had second thoughts. If maybe, he’d wondered if coming over here might be an important next step in this non-relationship that he just isn’t ready to take, now or ever, not with Shiro. Not outside of work.

Not when he’s been nothing but honest about his intentions, no matter how stupidly and selfishly Shiro has chosen to disregard them.

But he can’t help but feel as though there’s more to this. He can’t help but linger on the silly fantasy that maybe Keith’s just wanting to take things slowly. Maybe he doesn’t trust that Shiro would want more from him than just casual sex. Maybe he doesn’t understand how the light in the control room hits his skin and glows against the gold of it like fireflies twinkling in a wide night sky. Maybe he doesn’t understand how the black of his eyes in the dark reminds Shiro of something infinite and all-consuming, like he could find himself swallowed up and falling forever, deeper and deeper inside of them. Buried inside of Keith, feeling like a whole person with meaning and dedication and a place for himself in this universe for the very first time in his life.

He doesn’t know if Keith understands how clever he can be, how funny he is privately, and quietly, in a sneaky hiss of an insult at Lance’s expense, or a snide comment about a customer that has Shiro laughing when he thinks about it even hours later. He doesn’t know if Keith just can’t comprehend everything that Shiro has learned about him since they first met—how he secretly likes a lot of the music that Shiro plays. How he gets more riled up when Bonnie Tyler plays, for whatever reason. How sometimes he obviously takes his time cleaning the rink just so he can skate. How he’s fit and clearly exercises even outside of work hours. How he seems so much more at ease in the roomy hoodie and sweatpants that he wears before and after his shifts than he appears all glitzed up and covered in makeup.

How he never seems to be completely comfortable in his own skin, but he tries so hard to ignore the insecurities that often, he so obviously feels, even if those feelings of his might not be so obvious to anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.

Shiro knows that sometimes he embarrasses Keith, when he’s tender. Sometimes he can see Keith’s gaze through the tinted window lingering, unknowingly, straight up at him, as though he finds some level of comfort in the mere idea that Shiro is sitting up there, watching over him. Sometimes he laughs when Shiro plays a particularly bad song. Sometimes he gets so angry during his daily arguments with Lance that Shiro has worried that things might get physical.

Keith clearly cares about this job a lot, even if he doesn’t love the uniform. He comes in for extra shifts sometimes on his days off. He does more than his fair share of work even while taking extra breaks, even though he clearly doesn't enjoy really… any aspect of the job itself.

And while Shiro might have his own selfish and cheesy, surely incorrect theories about what aspect of this business Keith cherishes so much that he isn’t willing to get fired, well… as it stands, he really isn’t entirely sure what that is. Keith might say a lot through actions alone, or maybe Shiro has just gotten that good at reading him after watching him from afar for so long, but Keith, himself, hasn’t ever been very forthcoming with personal information.

The wait for Keith’s arrival is a painstaking one, but he busies himself with his anxiety and wringing his hands as he stands awkwardly in the center of his living room. Belatedly, he decides that maybe he should turn something on the television, if only to add an air of casualness to all of this. If only to lull Keith into a possibly false sense of security when he finally gets here and sees that maybe Shiro only invited him over as an afterthought during a boring evening and not as the main event of his day. Shiro decides to play it cool, because Keith is cool. Because Keith deserves cool. Because Keith, he thinks, isn’t interested in the kind of guy who cleans his apartment obsessively and sets everything up just right, or the kind of guy who buys three different flavors of soda just in case his guests don’t love Sprite or Mellow Yellow, but they really could have went for some Sunkist.

He distracts himself with running over the list of things that he’s already done, making sure that everything is in place, anything embarrassing is locked safely away, and that nothing is even remotely disorganized or _too_ organized in a way that might turn Keith off. He’s gone with a more comfortable, disheveled look for today. Nothing is too neat or well kept. Maybe it’ll look like he didn’t even clean. Like he’s this tidy regularly—but then he wonders if Keith would be weirded out by that. He wonders if Keith would prefer to spend his time around someone who isn’t quite as tightly wound. He’s fretting over whether or not he should clutter his counters when there’s a knock at the door. While his blood runs ten degrees hotter at the mere suggestion that it could be Keith standing out there, waiting, when he isn’t nearly as ready as he thinks that he should be, he knows painfully well that it couldn’t be anyone else.

He doesn’t get a lot of visitors. He doesn’t have a lot of time for a social life outside of work and sleeping, and spending his pathetic lapses of freedom daydreaming and reading and imagining that maybe he’d ever be brave enough to actually invite Keith over.

And now that this moment has come, he almost doesn’t want to open the door. He almost continues standing stock still just in front of the counter, clamoring in the sudden onset of terror and wondering how long Keith might wait around outside before turning heel and going home. And how awkward things would be at work during their next shared shift if he really did go through with ignoring him, standing him up after inviting him to his apartment, with the TV on loud enough that Keith can surely hear it from outside of the door, and himself, shaking and knocking things about as he scrambles to let Keith in before it’s too late.

He’s definitely disheveled when he opens the door, at least. It’s not quite as charming and sexy as Keith always manages to pull off, and he’s suddenly, painfully insecure about his t-shirt and old jeans when he sees that Keith does, in fact, own nice clothes. And he’s wearing them now, while Shiro, comparatively, looks like a total slob. His long hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, it looks bright and glossy and freshly washed. Keith smells nice, like cologne. He has a bottle of wine tucked under his arm.

And he’s flushing brightly, barely managing to meet Shiro’s eyes. As though he has any reason to be embarrassed after obviously making the effort to look nice, while Shiro appears to have taken things less seriously. Shiro is absolutely mortified that he obviously misread this date as something more casual, as something that meant less to Keith, when…

That’s clearly not the case.

His voice, lodged deep in his throat, tumbles out croaky and unpracticed as he abruptly tears himself back and extends a shaky arm into his apartment in the motion of inviting Keith in.

“H-hey, uh, hi. Um. Thanks for… for coming! For being here. Thanks for… coming over today. For coming to… spend today with… me.”

Keith brushes past him wordlessly. He turns, swivels easily on his heels, and watches Shiro for a long moment from the center of the room, just close enough to the couch and the coffee table that he could set down the wine and take a seat if Shiro were smart enough to invite him to. Shiro lingers for a moment longer, breathing in the unexpected sight of Keith, in the flesh, looking gorgeous as he’s ever looked and standing right in the middle of Shiro’s apartment, like a dream crashing hard into reality. Like a few choice shameful fantasies that usually end with the sound of Shiro’s alarm blaring in his ears and inviting him to discover the mess that he made in his underwear while he was asleep.

His heart patters, needless and distracting, in his chest. His breath stalls in his throat and aches in his lungs. Keith is pretty even without the smoky shadow around his eyes and the glitter on his cheeks, without the big, teased hair and the padded jacket accentuating already broad shoulders. Keith is pretty now even though he’s looking at Shiro expectantly, even as he’s tapping his fingers over the surface of the wine bottle in his hands, obviously unsure of where to move from here while Shiro continues to stand by his open door as though someone else is bound to join them any moment now.

Jerky and too quick, too awkward and loud, Shiro closes the door hard and stumbles further into the room. He extends his hands and stammers out a clumsy “thanks” for the wine, gesturing as though he can take it. It’s warm, like Keith just lifted it from a shelf at the store on his way over. It isn’t chilled, as he would imagine that someone Keith’s age might keep it in the fridge if he’d brought it with him as an afterthought. Shiro doesn’t recognize the brand, so it isn’t the cheap stuff that he used to drink more than water in college. He wonders how much Keith invested in coming here today. He wonders why Keith might have gotten dressed so nicely and dolled himself up when he didn’t know sooner than just thirty minutes ago that Shiro was going to invite him over today.

He sets the bottle on the kitchen counter. He promises himself that he’s not going to get his hopes up. He calls out from the kitchen to tell Keith to take a seat. The movie that he’d queued up on TV is in the beginning scenes still, when the protagonist meets her love interest by chance. When they start off as near-rivals and slowly progress to begrudging friends. Shiro regrets the decision to turn on a rom-com. He wishes that he would have gone with action instead. Keith doesn’t seem even remotely like the kind of person who would be interested in these sorts of movies, but a quick glance into the living room around the corner of the kitchen wall tells him that Keith is watching dutifully, his phone still hiding somewhere in one of his pockets, his hands balled in his lap.

Shiro hadn’t thought that they’d actually be watching any of the movies today, if he’s being honest. It might have been a whimsical, fleeting, romantic misjudgement, maybe the need for background noise as they’re often accompanied by at work. But he’d imagined, in the more realistic part of his brain, that Keith would come in and they’d exchange few words. Hands would find skin and mouths would find mouths and soon enough they’d be getting intimate on the couch, or the chair across from it, or the kitchen table in a few rogue fantasies that had kept him up at night. He hadn’t been stupid enough to actually believe that this could be a date, even if he’d been nervous enough and hopeful enough to prepare for one, but…

Maybe he misunderstood. Maybe, by some miracle handed down to him by the Goddess of love herself, Keith actually came here today under the impression that Shiro was going to prove to him, once and for all, that he’s a perfect candidate for a romantic interest, and not just a fuck buddy, and not just the guy who Keith wastes boring parts of his shifts with five days a week at the roller rink.

He decides to stall just a little, just to collect his thoughts. He grabs two glasses from the cabinet, tearing the paper from the seal of the wine bottle and digging through his cutlery drawer in search of the corkscrew. He fills the glasses, both halfway, just how they do in the movies. He isn’t sure if he wants to ask if Keith is hungry until he gauges the mood more. He could be reading this wrong. He could be misinformed. He could be allowing his own romantic preoccupations with how this evening should unfold to cloud his judgement and the last thing that he wants is to come off as some kind of creepy stalker when Keith was really only interested in the booty call.

So he carries the drinks in carefully. He holds one out to Keith and basks in the cute little flush that crawls back up to Keith’s cheeks when he reaches out to take it by the stem. Shiro elects to sit far enough away that Keith doesn’t feel too smothered, puts an entire couch cushion section between them, his right elbow rested on the arm rest while the left half of Keith’s body occupies the other side. Keith glances at him once or twice, as though he’s trying to be discreet. And he takes a few sips of his drink, flicking his gaze back to the screen and proceeding to focus so hard on whatever plotline is unfolding that Shiro almost wonders if he’s actually invested in whatever might be going on on-screen.

They sit in silence that’s filled by the music of the movie and the actors’ voices, by the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the A/C kicking on and off at random intervals. Shiro downs his glass a little bit faster than he should, but the heavy rush of it into the pits of his belly and the warmth of a comfortable buzz over his skin ease his nerves. He slouches back just a little further against the couch cushions. He reminds himself to breathe, that he’s in his own space now, that there’s nothing really any weirder about having Keith in his apartment than the two of them messing around at work. At least today he won’t be wearing Keith’s roll-on glitter until he manages to take a shower and wash his work shirt. At least the smell of hairspray won’t be practically lining the inside of his nostrils and the back of his throat long after Keith has gone home.

He can’t stop himself from laughing softly at the mere absurdity of it all, at the sheer fact that this, of all things, feels out of place and unnatural to him when something as peculiar as having sex with one of the roller-skating waiters at an '80s themed roller rink multiple times a week is something so mundane and commonplace that it feels as natural as clocking in. Keith’s head snaps towards him as he laughs, and suddenly he’s reminded that he’s supposed to be the host here. And he’s being weird. He’s being _so_ weird, and Keith’s probably having a terrible time, probably rethinking every decision that led him here and wondering if quitting on the spot come tomorrow’s shift will look bad on his resume when he tries to find work elsewhere.

He clears his throat, scratching at the back of his suddenly-hot neck.

“S-sorry,” he says softly, cracking a lopsided smile and forcing himself to meet Keith’s eyes despite how blinding he is now, even just staring wide-eyed and still curiously pink-cheeked in Shiro’s direction, “I was just… I was thinking about how it’s weird, I guess… Seeing you in casual clothes and stuff. And how weird it is that it’s even weird. Like, who would have guessed that I’d be more familiar seeing you in leg warmers and a bedazzled vest.”

Keith cracks a smile. He raises a single, thick brow.

“I could have worn the leg warmers over here if that’s what gets your rocks off.”

Shiro spits a laugh. His glass, sitting on the coffee table just in front of him, jostles with a few clinks as his leg nudges against the corner of the table. Keith is still cradling his glass close to his chest, but he’s midway done as well. It’s not enough to get drunk off of, no, but maybe it’s enough to take the edge off. Maybe all that they need today is a shared buzz to ease away the first time nervousness that’s so painfully natural when meeting up with a work fling outside of work hours.

“You look nice like this,” Shiro counters, quick to seize this opportunity before things get any stranger, and mentally patting himself on the back for doing so in such a graceful and natural way, “I mean, the '80s aesthetic looks good on you too, somehow, but you look really good in your own clothes. Although... you really should have teased your hair.”

Keith laughs in return. He smiles around the rim of his glass as he takes another drink.

“Do you know what a pain in the ass it is to wash that shit out every night? Every time I go to the gas station after work the stupid clerk calls me _Rocket Man_ , like he thinks he’s clever. That song didn’t even come out in the '80s. One night, I went to bed without washing my hair and I swear it was fused to the fibers of my pillow when I woke up.”

Shiro runs a hand through his hair, laughing softly and training his eyes on the TV. The protagonist is running through some kind of gag scene, and it seems that everything is going wrong in her wake. Shiro takes a moment to appreciate the fact that he actually can’t relate to that sort of narrative right now, that this date actually seems to be doing okay now, somehow, even though he can feel the nerves, that have been lodged just under his skin since earlier in the day, still skittering over his skin.

But Keith is smiling now, and he’s nearly done with his glass. Shiro almost asks if he’d like something to eat, if he’d like a refill or to turn something else on. He almost says a lot of things that die just as quickly on his tongue. And while the sudden quiet should feel awkward and uncomfortable, he can’t help but feel a newfound sense of confidence in himself, in this situation. In the realization that Keith apparently wants to talk to him, but neither of them knows the right words to say right now.

“Hey, uh…”

He isn’t sure where he’s going with this train of thought, but he allows it to draw out. There’s a sense of urgency edging every word tonight, every breath and wayward glance, electrically charged with the intentions that they both had when agreeing to meet up. This is still a booty call, he knows that. Tonight is still supposed to end in sex.

But it feels different now that Keith is actually talking. That they’re interacting more in the space of quiet that they often aren’t afforded at work. Shiro allows his gaze to slide back to Keith, watching him with pink-dusted cheeks, with lids just a little bit weighted by the buzz that they’re both feeling.

“I’m sorry if… this is forward, but… I like you, Keith. Like, I want to get to know you better. I know you probably just came here tonight to do… you know, the same thing that we do at work, but—”

“N-no, no. I… I know what you mean.”

Keith isn’t meeting his gaze.

“I’m weird, I know,” Keith tells him, eyes hard and focused on his balled fists in his lap, on his hands wrapped firmly enough around the stem of his empty glass that it shudders in his grasp, “I just… It’s not that I don’t like you, I just don’t… I don’t know how to react when you’re—when you’re nice like that. When you touch my face and… when you try to invite me out places and… when you wanna hang out after sex and stuff, I—I’m not really used to it, so I kind of get freaked out and I gotta leave to calm down, but... “

He raises his eyes. His skin has darkened to a deep scarlet that still looks so charming against the glossy black of his hair and his wide, dark eyes. The pink of his lip troubled between his teeth, and the deep navy of the jacket and black of his shirt underneath.

He still looks gorgeous, even when so embarrassed.

Shiro swallows hard, his mouth feeling suddenly dry.

“I like you too. I just… sometimes I’m not used to things and it’s kind of weird for me, and… then I know that I’m being weird and that makes it worse because why… why would a normal person be freaked out just because a hot guy like you wanted to touch his face during a blowjob? It doesn’t make any sense, like… any normal person would be embarrassed by the sex, right? But it’s like, you do these really nice things and I’ve never really… let someone do nice things like that before without getting annoyed, but with you, it’s different which is even weirder and… I don’t know, I just… get so weird around you...”

Shiro can’t help but breathe a sharp laugh. Keith is rambling now, but his words are singing in Shiro’s ears. His heart is beating so hard in his chest that he feels as though it might break out any moment now. Keith is trembling ever so slightly and somehow both of them have scooted closely enough together, leaned just far enough in that it takes no real effort for Shiro to reach forward, snag the wine glass from Keith’s hands, and set it aside with its twin on the coffee table.

He then slides a hand to rest against Keith’s heated cheek. He props his face upward so he can stare down into those dark and all-encompassing eyes.

And he smiles, his skin feeling alight with fire and vibrations of nerves, of happiness, of this still-persistent buzz that thrums in his chest.

“I get nervous around you too,” Shiro tells Keith, so close that it’s agony not to kiss him, “But it’s okay, we can take it slow. I just… I want you. No matter what that takes.”

It’s a heavy statement, and he can feel the weight of it in how Keith twitches, how his skin grows warmer, how their shared stare breaks and Keith’s eyes flick anywhere but right into his. Keith clears his throat and he jerks forward so quickly that he’s nothing but a blur of motion then the warm softness of his lips against Shiro’s. One hand rises to rest on top of Shiro’s on his cheek, the other grasping at Shiro’s shoulder to pull him closer into the kiss.

They’re hands and hungry mouths. They’re determination and eagerness to shed clothing that only gets in the way. Keith has Shiro’s shirt over his head and discarded on the floor beside them before he can even feel the fabric moving. Keith has fingers roving over the muscles of his abdomen before he can even hum at the warm pressure of his touch. Keith kisses along his jaw and presses teeth into his neck. He doesn’t bite and he doesn’t suck hard enough to leave marks. They both know that it would be too inconvenient once they got back to work. They’re still using some of the work rules dutifully: no talking about this later, no leaving marks where anyone can see. Don’t make a scene, don’t make too much noise. Shiro feels comforted by the familiarity. He feels as though this shouldn’t be any different than it ever feels in the control room chair, but he knows that that’s a lie. He knows that everything is different now, because Keith agreed that he likes him too. Keith feels the same static between them that’s been driving him wild since the first day that they met.

Keith wants to get to know him even beyond this, beyond the sex and the sneaking around. Beyond the lingering looks and the well-chosen songs and the almost-conversation that they often have when Keith looks up from the rink and stares at the solid black of the tinted windows as though he could possibly make out Shiro’s features through it.

Now, he’s fumbling with the button of Keith’s fly. He’s pulling down the zipper. Keith has eased his mouth away from Shiro’s skin but his fingers still explore. They thread into Shiro’s hair when Shiro slides down to rest his knees on the floor, when he tucks himself between the couch and the coffee table and tugs Keith’s pants down over his lifted hips, allowing them to pool around his ankles as he teases the firm tent in the front of his underwear.

Even these boxers seem new. Now that he thinks about it, Keith rarely wears underwear at work at all.

 _Easier access_ is the thought that filters to the front of his hazy brain, but that inspires a firm twitch of his own needy cock still restrained behind his fly, and so he focuses instead, first, on Keith.

Keith’s erection slips through the slit of his boxers easily, eagerly, and the feeling of it on Shiro’s lips and sliding beyond them, resting momentarily at the back of his throat before he moves his head—it’s not something that he’s usually allowed to experience. Keith doesn’t normally “waste his time” with foreplay unless it’s himself between Shiro’s legs. Maybe he trusts himself more to get Shiro off quickly. Maybe it’s just a little bit too intimate for his comfort.

But he doesn’t complain now and he definitely doesn’t shirk away. He grasps Shiro’s hair just tight enough in his fingers that Shiro can feel the roots tingling in his scalp. Keith’s blunted nails work shivers through him, and the taste of him, the salt of his precum, the smell of his cologne, the warmth of him and the softness, it’s enough that Shiro already feels close to the edge without even touching himself. It’s embarrassing, and so he focuses instead on whatever semblance of a technique that he’s ever managed to learn during the fleeting moments in his past when he’s actually done anything like this. He hollows his cheeks, drags his flat tongue over the underside of the head as he pulls back. He supplements the absence of his mouth with his hand, so big compared to Keith’s more delicate body. Keith’s thin and subtly muscular. Keith, at his tallest, stands maybe a head and a half shorter than Shiro. And his hands are half the size of Shiro’s, his hips, while intoxicatingly shapely, are far more narrow with longer, thinner legs. With smaller feet, with a little mouth that often feels almost too tight when it’s wrapped around Shiro’s cock.

Shiro shudders at the feeling of Keith’s hands in his hair, at the feeling of Keith folding over him, shaking, caging moans behind his teeth and breathing hard and stilted in a subtle show that he’s coming closer and closer to finishing already.

Shiro gets him there with his mouth alone. He resists the urge to dwell on his own lewdness when he makes a point of swallowing the mess the moment that Keith cracks open bleary eyes to look down at him.

Keith’s eyes widen then, his cheeks fan with dark color. Shiro smiles, then laughs, then cranes himself higher to press his lips against Keith’s just to test if he’s allowed to.

Keith doesn’t offer any resistance and he’s more than eager to lean down into the kiss. Shiro, tucked between his legs, rests both hands on each side of his face. Keith’s hands settle on his shoulders, Keith’s loose hair tickles his face. His heart beats quickly, his cock strains against the seam of his pants. Shiro decides that here, rested so comfortably with Keith all around him, is the only place that he’d like to be for the rest of his life. Here, with Keith’s soft lips captured in his, with Keith’s small fingers pressed into his bare shoulders. So close that he can feel Keith’s warm breath on his face, that he can feel their twin, quickened pulses mingling together. That their hard breathing melds into a single, solid sound, and Shiro finds himself so swept away in the moment that he barely remembers that he’s still hard, Keith is still willing to have sex with him, and there are definitely more things that he can do right now aside from simply kissing Keith again and again until he feels so dizzy that he doesn’t even know which way is up anymore.

Keith’s hands move to cup at the sides of his neck. Keith leans back and watches him with hot cheeks, with swollen lips, with a glassy, unfocused gaze and pupils so blown out that his eyes seem to be twin black holes drawing Shiro inward and closer, catching him for moments so long that they might as well be forever.

“Sh-Shiro.” Keith’s voice is shuddered and quiet. He’s breathless but clearly excited, clearly impatient to get the words out of the way and make room for whatever Shiro’s scattered thoughts are trying to remember comes after. “Do you… do you have condoms?”

Shiro is reminded abruptly of the small packet of condoms and the lube that he’d stowed away in one of the cabinets in the kitchen, just in case. He feels like an idiot when he shoots to his unsteady feet and heads there instead of making the longer trip to the bedroom or the bathroom, but he can’t find the will to care too much when this way, at least, he can find himself closer to Keith with more time to spare. He tears one from the roll, fumbling with the sticky bottle of the lube before carrying it between two careful fingers back into the living room. Keith has kicked off his pants and underwear, and he’s shrugged his jacket onto the arm of the couch behind him. He seems to be fretting with his shirt as though he isn’t sure if he’d rather wear it or not, and while Shiro definitely wouldn’t complain about having a full view of Keith’s naked body unobscured by the darkness or fog or the flashing lights beyond the window of the control room, he finds that he’s perfectly fine with it when Keith inevitably decides to keep it on.

He finds that Keith could even be sitting on his couch right now with the roll-on glitter smeared across his cheeks, the teased hair and the leg warmers, and he’d still have a very hard time not wanting to have sex with him.

He shuffles awkwardly for a half-second, pivoting from foot to foot as he watches the way that Keith’s soft skin seems to glisten and glow golden in the dimmed, purposefully atmospheric light of his apartment. He can almost imagine exactly how Keith might look dressed up as he’s often dressed up at work, and while the mental image of this is decidedly just a little bit hilarious, he can’t deny that he wouldn’t turn Keith down now even if his hair was feathered to the extreme. Even if he was smeared head to toe in that sticky glitter. Even if he reeked of his usual hairspray smell.

He fumbles with the zipper of his fly, sighing softly as his cock springs free and bobs eagerly in the open air. He shuffles out of his pants, kicking them off before tugging his boxers down one-handed. He sets the lube on the coffee table next to their glasses, tearing the condom wrapper open and pointedly looking anywhere but at Keith, who he can feel watching him, as he rolls it over his erection.

His cheeks feel warm, and that warmth fans out over the rest of his skin. His hands shake ever so gently, and in seconds, he’s managed to roll the condom over the expanse of himself. He tosses the wrapper blindly to the side. He’ll worry about that later. He wonders if that carelessness might read as attractive to Keith, or if maybe he just seems entirely too ready and not cool or collected or calculated calm.

Next, he grabs the lube, and he realizes that this is the cue for him to actually climb on top of Keith on the couch, and to touch Keith like he’s touched him many times before.

But it feels different tonight. Keith extends his arms to draw him in when he pads unsurely forward. Keith tugs him down into a kiss first, as he props himself on the cushion next to Keith’s head with his prosthetic, the only part of him that he trusts to stay stable right now and not shake or fold under the weight of everything currently rested so heavily on his shoulders.

They kiss for a moment, and his thoughts feel jumbled once again. He can hear the snap of the cap between them, can feel Keith sliding the lube out of his grip. And he feels a small amount being poured onto his open fingers, rubs it between them wordlessly as Keith recaps the bottle and reaches between them, straining to set it on the coffee table without accidentally dropping it on the floor.

His lips wander down Keith’s jaw to his throat, his fingers delve between them, his knuckles brushing the small line of hair from Keith’s navel down further below, before dipping between them and pressing gently between his cheeks. A quiet, needy sound bubbles out of Keith. Shiro pushes one finger inside. He’s so hard now, trembling with want, with excitement, with timidness. Keith is so warm and so soft and he smells so nice that it drives Shiro wild. His teeth press lightly into the junction of Keith’s neck and shoulder. His breath is hot and dewy against Keith’s skin. And it’s tight and warm and soft inside just as it always is, just as he thinks of guiltily later, when he fantasizes about Keith.

Keith keens faintly, scrapes dulled nails over his back, pulls him closer, spreads his legs and wraps them around Shiro’s waist as though trying to feel as much of him as he can at once.

One finger, then two. Scissoring them out and reveling in the tightness there. His cock twitches eagerly. He knows he’s not going to last long once he’s inside. He knows that Keith never cares how soon he finishes. He knows that Keith just wants to rock together now, to be close, to feel each other just as Shiro’s always ached to feel him too.

He slicks the remainder of the lube over his cock when he pulls his fingers out. He can tell by the hitch in Keith’s breathing and the legs tightening around him that Keith is growing impatient. He knows that Keith often seems to enjoy the feeling of being stretched out by his cock alone, that he has a slight masochistic streak that sometimes compels him to urge Shiro inside of him just before he’s totally ready for it. He knows that Keith isn’t always willing to wait around long enough to be prepared to a point of complete comfort. And he knows that now, like many times before, Keith is done waiting around when he could be getting fucked instead.

And so, he slides inside. He grits his teeth and he hisses at the feeling of that tightness easing around him. At the sight of Keith’s red cheeks and his open, swollen lips, and his glassy dark eyes and messy hair pressed to his damp forehead.

Keith’s ponytail has come loose, the band held just barely at the very tip, and his hair spills out all around him. It’s black seaweed against the clear, pale ocean of Shiro’s powder blue couch. Keith is a siren now, beautiful and dangerous and laid bare and deceptively vulnerable underneath him. Shiro kisses him as he pulls out slowly, kisses him when he pushes back inside. He kisses Keith so many times that he forgets how it must have felt in the past not to have his lips on him. Grows addicted to the warmth and the smooth softness of his skin. Finds himself lost in the push and pull, in the gradual snap of his hips inward and out. In the heat of Keith and the tightness of him all around him. He finishes so much quicker than he would like to. He rattles off a low groan, burying his face in the shallow curve of Keith’s neck into the jutting sharp line of his collar bone.

And they breathe together after that. Keith presses gentle lips to the side of his head, just above his ear. Shiro holds him for a very long time, and it’s quiet, save for the credits rolling on TV. Save for the refrigerator humming, for the sound of traffic outside and someone walking around in the hall outside of his door.

Shiro holds Keith and he never wants to let go.

He doesn’t want for things to go back to normal after this.

Desperately, selfishly, pathetically, he doesn’t want to go back to being co-workers, or fuck buddies, or strangers.

He just wants for things to be like this all the time, with them so close and happy and so nearly connected just in the way that he’s always wanted to connect with Keith, but never been brave enough or smart enough or good enough to know how.

But time passes, and tonight becomes tomorrow.

And bright and early the next morning, Shiro wakes up once again in his bed, alone. And he gets ready for another shift at work.

 

* * *

 

Bonnie Tyler playing over the speakers is the cue that Shiro gives Keith when he wants to see him in the control room the next morning.

As with most days, this works like a charm, even though he might never understand why. He can see Keith’s body stiffen far below as the music begins to play. As the dramatic clashing of drums and electronic instruments start to clamor and the lights dim and the smoke billows out overhead. Even through the deep purple hue bathed over the rink, he can tell that color is rising to Keith’s cheeks. He can see the way that he turns sharply and allows his gaze to linger on the black tint of the obscured control room windows. And for a long moment, they simply look at each other, until Keith shakes his head, turns away, and skates a few meters from the center of the rink to the exit.

It’s a little bit busier than usual today, with half a dozen patrons moving about down below and another dozen more in the restaurant area and occupying the arcade. Coran is training some new hire in the concession area, but he’s never taken notice of Keith’s numerous breaks before, and Shiro has no doubt in his mind that today will be no different. Shiro can’t help but breathe a laugh when he sees a disgruntled Lance replacing Keith in the rink, sparing one short, solemn look up at Shiro’s window as though to say, “You owe me” before skating off to help a patron who seems to have fallen down.

Shiro drums his fingers against the arm of his chair. He’s admittedly already a little hard just thinking about how quickly Keith took his leave this time, how much more eagerly he skedaddled than he ever has in the past. Sometimes, Keith keeps him waiting for two or three songs before he even gives any indication that he intends to come visit, sometimes it takes half a Bonnie Tyler album to actually coax him here. Shiro had asked about that too, at one point, worried that perhaps he was accidentally bullying Keith into being at his beck and call, but Keith had only scoffed back then, avoiding his eyes with dark color on his cheeks. And he’d called him an idiot, of course, and reassured him that sometimes it was just harder to slip away and sometimes he had to wait until Lance was actually available to ask for cover.

“It’s hard asking for favors from that asshole,” Keith had explained later on, “He always wants to be paid back. Don’t ever feel bad for him. I’m on vomit duty for the next two years just to repay him for the first three times that he covered for me.”

Shiro hadn’t been totally sure just how often people threw up around the building that Lance had specifically requested for Keith to take that job, but he hadn’t been exactly eager to find out either. He’d decided that maybe it was better left a mystery, one of few that he wasn’t achingly keen on uncovering about Keith, his work around this business, and how and why exactly he’d decided to start this secret rendezvous in the first place.

He listens in contentment to the rest of the Bonnie Tyler song as he waits, watches Lance’s dark pinprick of a figure moving about the rink and pausing only to have short, fleeting conversations with the patrons who ask for his assistance. Shiro wonders if Keith would ever have the opportunity to be employee of the month as Lance so often is, if he didn’t have such a giant distraction always pulling him away from his work when he could be doing more. He wonders if Keith would even _want_ that title, if he’d want a physical reminder of his time wasted here and the embarrassing state of his appearance forever cemented, framed on the wall in the locker room, as so many glittery-faced Lances watch them with that sly, smug smile each time that Shiro stops in to drop off his bag in the morning.

That doesn’t seem like Keith, if he’s honest with himself. He can’t feel guilty about this now, he knows, when this is definitely one thing that he didn’t ruin more for Keith than Keith adrently ruined it for himself. He knows that Keith has little to no online presence aside from a twitter account with no icon or description, with a single like from three years ago on a post from some dojo a few miles out of town. He knows that there exist no archives of selfies or no family photos or any implication that Keith enjoys being on the other end of the camera, being photographed and catalogued and cemented for an eternity even in online spaces. He doesn’t think that Keith would enjoy knowing that Coran would keep his picture up surely long after he quit this job and moved on to something else. And he isn’t sure if this arrangement between the two of them was himself, unknowingly seducing Keith into this life of sneaking around and blatantly breaking very reasonable company rules, or if it was just a welcome distraction that Keith had been vying after all along.

In the end, it doesn't matter much. He doesn’t feel used even when considering the very real possibility that he might have been a prop all along. Because Keith texted him this morning to greet him when he woke up and they had a short conversation. And Keith signed off with a smiling emoji in response to Shiro’s embarrassing heart. And his own heart feels lighter and stronger than it’s ever felt before, since he graduated from college, since he started working here. Since leg warmers became a regular sight in his day-to-day and '80s rock ballads stopped feeling exclusively like something that his parents used to listen to and more like the tunes that might forever be playing softly just at the corners of his subconscious.

Shiro is contented enough when Keith finally slips through the door that he can’t help but shoot him a dopey, lovestruck smile. Keith’s own lips tug up at the edges and his brows furrow, and he pushes out a small laugh as he clicks the door closed behind him and skirts through the crowded control room to draw closer to the seat, where Shiro has currently swiveled around to meet him.

His hands find Keith’s waist and Keith dips down to kiss him. Keith is warm and he’s still so soft and so narrow at the waist, still pretty even with the customary over-teased hair and the messy glitter and the garish colors of his uniform clashing with the new blue glow of the spotlights just through the tinted window.

Far below, Lance directs a group of clumsy skaters through an impromptu lesson. The music overhead bleeds from love song to upbeat retro pop. And Keith folds into Shiro’s lap just as perfectly as he always has. Shiro’s voice is so soft that it practically bleeds into the hum of the control board and the song droning on outside.

“Keith,” he murmurs, quiet and careful and winded when Keith pulls away and gazes down at him with those dark, deep eyes, “Can I ask… what’s—why Bonnie Tyler? Why is that the cue for you to come here?”

It’s the last piece of the puzzle anyway. With Keith in his lap, with the air between them cleared, with everything finally clicked comfortably into place, Shiro feels that this one last, silly thing might be the final part of this whole mystery that might tie everything neatly together.

Keith breathes a laugh. Color rises to his cheeks.

“You played her music all day when you first started working here… before Coran taught you how to change the artists, remember?”

Shiro feels embarrassment warm his skin. He does. How could he ever forget that? Years of college and he couldn’t figure out a simple switchboard. $30k down the drain when faced with the task of mastering a very clunky, outdated piece of technology.

“Coran sent me up here to explain it to you and you introduced yourself with the wrong name—Shiro Shirogane—and I laughed at you. But you were cute. And Bonnie Tyler always reminds me of that, of you back then. Of… how it felt kind of nice, I guess, to be the kind of person who makes other people forget their own names.

It’s dumb, I guess, but… I had a crush on you even back then. But that time, that… moment. That was the one moment when I knew that you were kind of into me, so… I like her songs.”

Shiro can’t stop the laughter that rattles through him until he’s quaking with it. He’s laughing so hard that Keith, suddenly wide-eyed and cherry-cheeked, is shaking in his lap. Keith calls him an asshole, tells him that it isn’t that funny, tells him to stop it and be quiet or someone might hear them.

But Shiro is happy now, Shiro can’t stop himself from overflowing with the happiness that he feels.

Because all this time that he’d spent pining after Keith, telling himself that he’d never be good enough, that he couldn’t understand Keith, couldn’t get close enough to matter to him…

Keith had felt that way, too.

The control room, historically, has been Shiro’s favorite hookup spot. It’s the home where he wastes half of his week, where he lives and eats and sometimes dozes off during shifts, and sometimes, when he’s very, very lucky, Keith will sneak up here and join him.

But today, the control room is used for something else entirely.

For talking and laughing and kissing for so long that Lance actually risks coming up the stairs to bang on the door once too much time has passed. And that’s okay with Shiro, when Keith sighs and shoves off of him. When Keith kisses him softly and saunters to the door to take his leave.

They’ll meet up after work and go out to dinner. He’ll give Keith time to take a shower and change into more comfortable clothes.

They have the rest of their lives now to get to know one another—not as co-workers or fuck buddies or two men stuck on the cusp of almost meeting but never quite connecting right, again and again.

But this time, as boyfriends or lovers or something not quite there but getting closer every time that Keith comes to visit him, or catches his gaze blindly through the window, or texts him back and talks to him uninhibited by the misunderstandings and missed connections that so often stalled their progress before.

Shiro watches absently as the black dot of Keith’s body skates back onto the rink.

He smiles gently, reaches forward and changes the song to Bonnie Tyler’s _More Than a Lover_.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the wonderful Epi for a really neat exchange that we did among friends! The challenge was to listen to a playlist made by another person in the group and write a story/make art based off of it. Epi’s playlist can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBIe9DKdZeMAhIencDDw7IBotpBa1nf2H), if you want to listen to it!
> 
> Thanks so much for reading! I really hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> [tumblr](http://curionabang.tumblr.com), [twitter](https://twitter.com/MothIsland)


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